Recently I’ve done a three part series building out an uncommon Commodore 64 motherboard and case combo, and posted twice about new tea stores in Sydney . I may have even been working on that aforementioned 8-bit computer while drinking a beverage from one of those establishments. I could have even written and saved a review for the drink, then transferred it to my desktop for publishing onto the site you’re currently engaged with reading. Now, is a word with three letters. I don’t co...

My first thought was the field of pink petals. Day by day, petals fall from the tree as green leaves grow from the blossom. I wonder for how long the petals will keep falling. There seem to be a million dots of pink in spring, through which there is a new perspective to see every day. Yesterday I saw a reflection. Today I saw growth. I hear birds walking among the bushes; grey tits flutter their wings as they move from branch to branch. I paused to look at one bird and then I saw several. With...

Should I do something similar? I don't have an academic journal like they do. I would need to find something that would work for a regular web site. I looked for recommendations for BibTeX, and found several suggestions on stackoverflow : @misc{…} @electronic{…} @internet{…} @online{…} The answers on that page and elsewhere were consistent about using title = {…} author = {…} but inconsistent about year = {…} vs originalyear = {…...

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C . I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads . Pictured above is t...

The United States added 178,000 jobs in March 2026 alone, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3 percent — a labor market that, by any historical measure, remains close to full employment. This article pulls together the latest verified figures on how many Americans work, where they work, how long they work, and how those numbers are likely to shift by 2030. Employment in the United States: Key Statistics for 2026 Total nonfarm payroll employment reached approximately 159 mi...

Copyright, patent, and trademark are not natural rights: they are legal instruments invented at specific times to serve specific interests. The expansion of intellectual property rights over the past forty years was a deliberate political project, pursued by specific industries, over the objection of economists who predicted (correctly) that it would harm innovation. Understanding this history is essential for evaluating current claims about AI training data, open source licensing, and platform ...

Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 rover rolling out of the lander’s ramp during pre-launch testing; Bottom left: The co-added spectrum from all 23 lunar surface soil and rock measurements by the rover’s X-ray spectrometer; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: ISRO / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard How Chandrayaan 3 contributed insights on our Moon’s origin and evolution Results from Cha...

I just released LLM 0.32a0 , an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versions of LLM modeled the world in terms of prompts and responses. Send the model a text prompt, get back a text response. import llm model = llm . get_model ( "gpt-5.5" ) response = model . prompt ( "Capital of France?" ) print ( response . text ()) This made sense when I start...

I am a smolweb advocate and, sometimes, I use LLMs. 2026-05-02 19:15 I spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity. Fewer dependencies, lighter pages, tools that do one thing well. So yes, it might look strange that I also spend time talking to large language models. Let me explain where I draw the line, and why I think the contradiction is smaller than it appears. What I avoid I do not use LLMs to generate images, musics or videos. Not because I am against creativity, but because that...

Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport. Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport.

I've read a few posts about people leaving GitHub recently, and following my short note to the Fediverse a number of people have piped up saying they're not fans of GitHub, either. From the reading I've done, these frustrations are usually threefold: Microsoft ownership Microsoft training Copilot on open source software Large amounts of downtime In all honesty, none of the factors above really bother me that much. I think that's because I don't rely on GitHub for anything signi...

This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid sin(x) to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: \[s(x)=A\cdot sin(w\cdot x+\theta)\] We’ll see how adjusting the parameters , and affect the shape of s(x) . Each section below covers one of these aspects mathematically, and you can use the demo at the bottom to experiment with the topic visually. Scaling Scaling is conceptually the simples...

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it felt slow and unwieldy to be starting these new browser processes all the time, and it involved some Node code to orchestrate the tests. The result is that I just don’t test my frontend code ...

No, rising house prices are not the driver of sharp fertility declines. The evidence shows only modest, mixed effects that cannot explain the large drops observed in places like Canada. What the Research Actually Shows: A well-known study by Dettling and Kearney (2014) found that rising house prices have opposing effects: they slightly increase fertility among homeowners (via a “home equity” or wealth effect) and slightly decrease it among renters (via a price effect). At average U.S. ho...

A bit of a streamlined edition, this month. Lots of interesting links still, but less commentary. You can put that down to me prevaricating on getting my previous blog about Materialized Tables in Apache Flink finished, and leaving myself little time to work on this one :) Not including the detailed narration actually knocks a bunch of time off the preparation—I’d be interested in your feedback as to how much the absence of narration impacts (if at all) your enjoyment of reading it. Let me...

The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of software engineering. We are between stable equilibria today in SWE: the old one, of needing humans to drive any code change, and a yet-to-be-established new one, where AI agents write most code. Taking as a premise that AI agents will write a large fraction of code in the new equilibrium, we will nee...

Qiji T1000 quadruped from Dax Robotics, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran The latest war-r...

Minimal Viable Zig Error Contexts May 3, 2026 fn process_file (io: Io, path: [] const u8 ) ! void { errdefer log.err( "path={s}" , .{path}); const fd = try Io.Dir.cwd().openFile(io, path, .{}); defer fd.close(io); // ... } Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling — strongly-typed error codes . Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic solution is to pass a Diagnostics out paramete...

Roughly 540 million years ago, toward the start of the Cambrian Period, the planet was mostly ocean, and life was both alien and vaguely familiar. Small, phallic-looking worms rummaged through ocean-floor sediments while blind swimming beasts flung out whiplike tentacles to ensnare prey. Meanwhile, early versions of mollusks and sponges populated the seafloor as jellyfish floated above. Source Roughly 540 million years ago, toward the start of the Cambrian Period, the planet was mostly ocean,...

It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly dog can change someone’s life. He certainly change mine, for better or for worse, and he also changed me in the process. Both physically and spiritually. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly...

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Today was a really nice and sunny day, so I went out with some friends from uni. We went to a Café (no shops open on International Workers' Day) and decided to go to the museum next to it because museums are free with our student ticket thing. The main exhibit in the museum atm is " WOMEN IN THE DARK " by Franziska Greber ; an exhibit about misogyny and violence. Not very fun and whimsical, like the day upto then, but we liked it and we spent a few hours there looking at everything. The ...

The financial industry understands itself to be an arm of the government. We were inducted into this service other-than-willingly through the ordinary operation of law and regulation. This is uncontroversial and unsurprising to insiders. A claim which will be more surprising: some regulated financial institutions have delegated authority for account- and transaction-level decisioning to a non-profit. Another: that non-profit includes a private intelligence agency, which runs covert assets, publi...